Woohoo…some of us have been talking about it since 1840.

I haven’t read the piece yet, not wanting to be influenced by another writer before I see what I have to say. Signature chuckle…well, how do I know what that is? I haven’t written it, yet.

That only sounds like an odd thing to say; it isn’t. That is how our minds work, you know: we dump information in the hopper, our brains process the data, and then we have to get the results out either through writing or speaking. “Thinking” is the act of imposing order on facts, of deducing connections, of correlating interlocking facets, of discerning order and patterns. Thinking is similar to using a washing machine: first you put in water, detergent, and dirty clothes. Close the lid and turn the machine on. Go away for a while. Sure enough, in general when you return the device has cleaned your clothing, but it isn’t anywhere near ready to wear. You have to get it out of the cavity and process items further by drying and then folding and putting away. Only then do you have fresh, clean jeans to wear.

What I think about secession basically is that it is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but a dangerous pursuit to advocate publicly. Janet Napolitano and the alphabet soup guys do not take kindly to the notion of freedom in any way, and for the precise reason that Abraham Lincoln did not. When asked why he didn’t just let the South go, Lincoln exploded in a rage, “Let the South go? LET THE SOUTH GO? How, then, should I fill my coffers?”

Documented historical fact. Look it up for yourselves. Winners write history and the North/Leftists have had nearly 160 years to spin their propaganda, but the fact is that the South was the wealthy portion of the country back then. Cotton was, indeed, king, the Feds had gotten themselves into monetary trouble, and bankruptcy was imminent! The back room Congressional brawls were over whether to declare the USA closed at the Mississippi and raise taxes, or to hit tariffs even harder to benefit their factories and shipping businesses, improving their bottom lines and increasing tax revenues. Greed and tariffs won. Hit the South for the enrichment of the North. Hit those who produced cane, corn, and cotton for the benefit of those who consumed and controlled shipping and rail transport and to increase federal control.

We are still disagreeing over the same issues, although the team names have changed. The War for Southern Independence (aka “The War of Northern Aggression” on our side and “The War of the Rebellion” on the other) was about financial matters and the proper role of government. The Southern states had been sold a bill of goods that they were going to get something similar to the original Articles of Confederation before the Constitution and still expected that. Th’ Yankees, for simple terminology, have mocked “States’ Rights” deliberately and consistently as a giant joke since who flung th’ chunk, but it isn’t and they know it quite well. It is a grave issue of utmost importance to those of us who wish to be responsible for our own behavior and neither beholden to any government anywhere nor raped for the benefit of those who outvote us.

The war was and is about freedom and money, what else? Slavery was a distraction, an attempt to pretty up the naked aggression of the North, long after the war was started by firing on Ft. Sumter, and Lincoln never freed a single slave. His famous proclamation applied only to slaves in territory he did not control; it certainly did not free slaves in the North. Yes, the Northerners had slaves, too, and Yankee ship captains were the ones who plied the slave trade. Not one Southern ship was ever a blackbirder.

Lincoln was looking for spin and a highly-emotional issue to cloak his behavior. He was a despicable man, the original Illinois super politician.

The South was in a manpower bind, with every free man already working, and was phasing out slavery as rapidly as possible, should this issue still disturb you. Slave labor is the most expensive, least effective solution to a problem, but until machinery was invented to pick cotton and process cane, the South had no other choice save not remaining in business.  Slaves have to be fed, housed, clothed, purchased, and provided with medical care, and then someone has to stand around constantly to get any sort of work at all out of them. Slavery is wildly uneconomical, and sharecropping isn’t much better in terms of Return On Investment. Southerners came from different portions of the British Empire; the North was settled by small shopkeepers and religious zealots, while the richer land and more hospitable climate of the South drew those who live on and in harmony with the land, particularly those from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

If you’re still dubious, here are some facts: 70% of all Southerners never owned a single slave. Slaves were very expensive; a prime field hand cost $2,000, making him at least a Maseratti. A trained ladies’ maid or butler was even more. Sure, you could abuse a slave because you owned him, but how many people would? Do you key your car and take a baseball bat to the windshield just because you can (so long as you do not file an insurance claim?) Normal people don’t. Free blacks who owned slaves were more likely to do so, historically. Yankee overseers weren’t always nice, either, abusing the workers occasionally in an attempt to exceed production quotos.  Even so, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was sheer, sentimental, sensationalist hogwash.

27% of those in the South never owned more than two slaves. Slaves were a luxury in a land where it was all but impossible to hire a maid or a farm hand.

Only 3% ever owned three or more slaves, and no, neither Gone with the Wind nor Mandingo were at all true to life. Yes, there were a very few stereotypical antebellum mansions, just as there are a very few of those who own ski lodges in Vail and summer places on Martha’s Vineyard, and buy ambassadorships and $540 Lanvin tennis shoes.

The BIG question is…why did the Southerners resist so fiercely? Would you go fight and die for Nancy Pelosi’s power when there is nothing in it for you? Would you fight to maintain Al Gore’s lifestyle? Would you go into battle to ensure that Michelle Obama can have ten thousand dollar purses? What stupid questions. Of course not.

The South fought for what it believed, which was that we were free and independent states entitled, in writing, to withdraw from the “union” whenever we wished, and to govern ourselves as we see fit. That we saw no reason to be impoverished for the benefit of shipbuilders, bankers, and politicians. That all we wanted was to be left in peace instead of being robbed and attacked. That Yankees are crazy and our totally different lifestyle is vastly superior…and we haven’t changed our minds.

Once again, the issue was and is redistribution of wealth and unbridled governmental control. I wrote recently about the enormous tariff Obama slapped on tire imports. 5,000 tire workers lost their jobs when several manufacturers of low-end tires could not compete with China, which holds about 15% of the market. Well, Statists can’t have that! 5,000 voters and union favor are clearly more important than affordable tires for most of us. The tariff was raised from 4.7% to nearly 40%, and the cheapest tire (not counting one of those ridiculous donuts) in WalMart went immediately from $49 to $125. Did this reopen the tire plants or create 5,000 jobs to replace those that could not compete in a faintly free market? No, of course not. It did not, and will not, create a single job. It did become another enormous tax on the American driving public. “Oddly” enough, only enormous tires for 18-wheelers are exempt, leading one to suppose that Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., still has a bit of influence.

A tariff IS a tax, a way of transferring wealth.  It targets the many for the wealth of a few. It is monopolistic in nature. By hobbling Chinese imports, American manufacturers are not obliged to practice competitive business policies. Their market is protected at the expense of the customer. Mind, I haven’t really any problem with monopolies, which are self-correcting in a free market. Goodyear (or whoever) couldn’t compete at the low end, and China snagged 15% of the market. If US manufacturers want the low-end market back, they need to produce better tires at the same prices or cheaper similar tires than China can.

My preliminary thoughts on secession, then, are that we should understand what we want and how we can get it. Do many really care whether or not Hawaii, for example, becomes a free nation again? Sure, some few Romantics do, but for all practical purposes Hawaii has belonged to Japanese Democrats most of my life. The Hawaiians of the blood royal have a very good point: the US wrested the throne from Queen Liliuokalani. Beats me why they want it back, but it sounds fair to me.

What we had better care about is whether or not the massive Federal government continues to grow unchecked and ever more rapacious and dictatorial. It makes me very nervous when new laws make it impossible for us to leave the country without proper documentation! Shades of the Berlin Wall. Canada and Mexico make no such demands; Washington D.C. does. Do you deal well with something called a “trusted traveler” document? I don’t. How about “no fly” lists that forbid you to get on an aircraft going anyplace? Not healthy, people. Not all Gulags are in northern Russia. A gulag is a state of mind and overwhelming force, not a matter of location.

RFID-chipping animals, machinery, clothing, and humans is to increase government surveillance, identification, and control. One problem in Iraq and Afghanistan, as it was in Viet Nam, is that the “insurgents” blend into the rest of the population. Be very wary of the national “driver’s license” which functions as an identifying document and must be carried on your person. Eye askance the “traffic cameras” which are springing up, for they are meant to track vehicles, read those drivers’ licenses, and allow your every move to be monitored.

Big Brother watches us more every day, controls more of our lives, and is backing us into corners where we can neither flee nor supply our own needs through our own efforts. The Food “Safety” Bill will make it illegal to use any save genetically-modified seeds from Monsanto (dangerous and do not propagate from what you grow), allow the government to know where every head of cattle and chicken is, and make it possible to locate every bite of food so that it can be confiscated at federal whim. It turns possessing raw milk out of your goat and the chicken you killed for dinner into crimes.

Taxing us at rates over fifty percent is unacceptable, but controlling the food supply is intolerable. Gun confiscation became far closer by a proposed “simple” tax of $50/year on each gun, something that need not even be voted on by Congress, since it is presented as “an IRS issue.” In order to take our guns, first they have to know where they are. As the founding father said, “Fear the government that fears your guns.”

Fear the government that has changed from the most basic of “thou shalt nots” to incessant meddling with every aspect of our lives, and holds that we are cows to be stripped for personal gain and to buy votes. King John is back on the throne, and in this version he does not have a brother named Richard, off fighting in the Holy Land. Robin Hood is a crony of the Sheriff of Nottingham. A successful secessionist movement that established a smaller truly independent nation with time to undo the harm of the past would be a start…but would Washington let the people go? I don’t think so.

Regards,
Linda Brady Traynham

November 17, 2009

What Can We Learn from 1860? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

1. At the current rate of taxation, even if nothing deteriorates, how much money does your wife need to live on after you are gone? The classic rule is “80% of your highest income plus a paid for house.” Right. If you make $100,000/year, you need to accumulate through savings or insurance $1.6M in capital at 5% interest. Problems: inheritance taxes are due to cut back in, and Uncle definitely wants a chunk of $1.6. Worse, the interest will be taxed as income and she isn’t going to find 5% interest. Let us suppose that she has $1000/mo in Social Security—a little over the average, but you’ve got a good job. A loving government will take roughly 10% of that away from her immediately too pay for Medicare and has already announced a 20% increase in fees over the next three years…with no increase in COLA, or the “Cost Of Living Allowance.” According to the Feds there is no inflation, hence her costs will not rise. We would love to know where those who make such pronouncements buy groceries, gasoline, socks, and tires. Supposing naively that she pays no income tax, if she puts the $250,000 in insurance you may have arranged for her in a CD at 1.5%, at the end of the first year she will have $3,750 in interest plus the theoretical $11,100 in Social Insecurity, for a total income of $14,850. Social Security probably won’t cover the house note you almost certainly have, and houses aren’t selling well. Her alternatives are to find a job or live on what she has for three years and hope she can find husband. That is certainly neither a safe nor a dignified plan, although it may make more sense than buying lottery tickets. The worst part is, that’s the best I can foresee for her.

2. The Greater Depression arrives, as it almost certainly will. It doesn’t matter whether you’re married or single, how safe is your job? 26,000,000 of the things have disappeared already in this century, and unless you are among the 40% of the populace which works for some governmental entity or a CEO you night want to do a little worrying. Japan is on the twenthieth year of their last depression, with a brand new government devoted to the project of becoming an economic block with India, and a few sprats such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, hunks of Indonesia, and so forth. Yup, our little island nation friend is going to grow up, leave the nest, and devote itself to destroying the dollar. What they plan to do with the two trillion or so they hold I have no idea, but if they knock the dollar out as the reserve currency they have some notions. The ironic part is that those dollars have little value at present and are under pressure from all sides, from Bernanke and Geithner’s government-sanctioned counterfeiting and money-laundering (swooshing the new cash around through Treasuries and the market, for example), to cheerful plots in the Middle East and BRIC. It’s coming, get ready for it.

3. The stock market takes a 40% thud at the year’s end, the bond market crashes, the ARM supply has 80% set to re-arm, commercial real estate looks like a yeast vat it bubbles so freely, and a lot more banks are set to fail. Some may even be “set up” to fail. These government-made disasters are pretty much set in stone and will coincide with your other choices.

4. Government revenues are down 17%, the jobless rate is at 17% by rational accounting methods, and a great many states have balanced budget requirements. They will have only two recourses: raise taxes again, or cut jobs and “services.” ARE we having fun yet? 25% of those working are paying all of the income taxes and virtually all property taxes—and schools and bureaucracies demand more money every year. Protests against government spending and taxes are becoming more visible.

5. OPEC members have been running on the American Plan in large part, tossing around bread and services to keep their citizens from expressing noisy opinions of fleets of silver Mercedes Benze automobiles, some of them diamond studded. At one point in the last year it took Saudia Arabia, as I recall, $70/barrel just to cover the “social services” portion of their budget. Basically, every dime the Sauds get for a barrel these days is already committed to welfare, which means it is rather expensive to give away their declining oil supply. Throw the peak oil mess and the miraculous never-depleting “reserves” OPEC nations claim into this bucket. Meanwhile, back on the home front, the Greens are fully in control; drilling rights that had been negotiated were blocked recently, coal is threatened under cap and tax, don’t even mention nuclear power, and hydroelectric dams stand idle because the water has been flushed uselessly to help dear little fishies. Oh, and the crops failed in California when the water was diverted from irrigation.

6. The citizenry of these “united” states turns ugly for a variety of reasons, ranging from food or energy scarcity, taxation, the avalanche of new socialistic legislation, union members who have priced themselves out of jobs, racial or religious riots, and/or a hearty disinclination to put up with this any more. For an eyeful, ask Google how many states and a group of islands have strong secessionist movements. Funny Hawaii ne! Seems like they want Queen Liliuokalani’s throne back, and who can blame them? The real situation is that Hawaii has belonged to Japanese Democrats since I was graduated from the University of Hawaii, all those decades ago.

7. Some combination of the above appears, and the government proves that a government no longer strong enough to give the masses what they want is still strong enough to implement everything from the War Powers Act to the “PATRIOT” act, and turns completely totalitarian on us. Obama declares a national emergency, dismisses Congress (don’t come back boy and girl millionaires; your cushy jobs have been abolished), and pursuant to Executive Order 11921, armed, uniformed thugs show up on your doorstep and loot your house of all foodstuffs, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, valuables, and anything else any member of the team fancies. De facto gun registration is becoming de jure as it is being sneaked quietly through Congress disguised as “a simple IRS measure.” It requires a tax of $50 a year on every gun you own—or admit owning—your fingerprints, and submitting to government psychological examinations on demand, as well as other unsavory regulations. Penalties for being in possession of “untaxed” guns will be quite severe. This section has two possible outcomes: the rednecked, gun owning, Bible-thumping, smoking, drinking, butter-and-red-meat-eating, bluejean-wearing, Limbaugh-listening, homophobic, racist domestic terrorists (description courtesy of Janet Napolitano and assorted government agencies) are in open revolt, and either win, or they don’t. My money is on the armies in Kevlar and Corcorans armed with up-to-the-minute genuine assault weapons, riding around in AP carriers and tanks, including the all-volunteer forces, the 100,000 or so Blackwater has, assorted UN “peacekeeping” forces, and the Canadians who are pledged to come to the aid of the president if asked. Oh…I forgot the two battalions of the Praetorian Guard assigned to the president’s personal use, the secret service, the FBI, Homeland “security,” and the BATF.

8. The depression and embargos on oil are so devastating that not even the government can muster the money to pay armies, and we drift quietly into The Greater Depression, with perhaps forty or more percent unemployment, irregular power services, little to buy in the stores, devalued dollars, cessation of Social Security and then drastic cuts in welfare, food, water, and fuel shortages, and a seething populace.

9. At some point, cauldrons roil over, the always-happy-to-riot sectors of “society” prevalent at Watts, Katrina, and Ike, and ghettos jump in happily, and the food supply is exhausted in the cities after three days, maximum. Millions die from heat, cold, thirst, tainted water, rampant disease, and assorted natural and man-made disasters.

10. In the fullness of time something on the order of 40,000,000 are dead from the aforementioned conditions, having argued with violent, hairy strangers, or been shot for fleeing like locusts from Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston (for starters) to spread out over the land attacking farm houses and taking over small towns. The farms will lose their future crops in most instances, and little towns will be barren of food, as well. When the population has been reduced sufficiently, the remainder will eke out an unpleasant existence grubbing in the soil attempting to learn to grow plants with not many seeds available, learning to raise animals and slaughter them (that being illegal by that time), discovering that medical care is almost nonexistent and is paid for in chickens and barter is the established method of commerce since the value of the dollar is on the order of that in Zimbabwe, and the LE (Law Enforcement) officials will likely not have enough manpower to say wearily more than “You shot it, you bury it.”

There y’are, the ten things which exercise my mind the most. You decide which one you’re going to worry about, and I’ll come back later and address the problems one by one. In the meantime, divest yourselves of dollars. Turn them into anything durable which you will need later.

Drearily yours,
Linda Brady Traynham

November 16, 2009

The Top Ten Things to Worry About Surviving in a Bad Economic Climate was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Huh.

Why? It’s because health officials in Howard County convinced the local government that teenagers are at too high a risk for melanoma and other types of skin cancer, and therefore shouldn’t expose themselves to indoor tanning. While one can argue that yes, tanning beds do increase the likelihood of getting cancer, banning our youngsters from going to tanning salons is not the right thing to do.

The ban, which takes effect today, means that teenagers who want to look like they went to Florida in the middle of January will have to either settle for pale skin this winter, or seek un-conventional methods of getting an artificial tan. All because it wouldn’t be nice to expose them to harmful rays. (Maybe Howard County would like to legislate which hours teenagers can be outside in summer, too.)

Now, this is exactly one more example of government intervention where it shouldn’t be intervening at all. The government — local, state and national — should promote healthy living and let us know what’s out there, in terms of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. But banning us from doing something like going to a tanning salon is nonsense. If 16-year-old Jane Q. Public wants to strap on her bikini and go to a tanning salon, that’s her business. (Heck, if 60-year-old Jane wants to do the same thing, that’s her business, too. Who am I to judge?) Aside from parents, who’s to say she has no right to do that?

I myself don’t frequent tanning salons, and thus have never been in a bed. (Whether by natural or artificial UV light, the results aren’t pretty.) But from what I understand from friends who do go to them, the salons give potential tanners a heads up that, yes, the lights are potentially harmful. And then it is up to the customers to decide whether or not they want to go forward and get a tan.

The bottom line is, people are smart enough to decide for themselves whether or not they want a tan. And they’re smart enough to do some research about salons, artificial tanning in general, the health risks, and decide if the pros outweigh the cons. Putting a ban on people under 18 from tanning won’t resolve anything. It’s just like underage smoking…teenagers who want to smoke are still going to get cigarettes. Most teens are taught — at an early age — the dangers of smoking and the consequences on the human body. But they choose to light up anyway.

Who’s to say that teenagers (and indeed, anyone really) wouldn’t go try and find some sort of underground method of getting their tan? They might know someone who knows someone who has a cheap, black-market kind of tanning bed, and get some artificial rays that way. Now, assuming this underground salon doesn’t know what they’re doing and has sub-standard beds, etc., isn’t that more dangerous for our kinds than for them to go to a “professional” salon?

Besides, in addition to all of these questions, I have yet another, this one directed at an institution we call government: Don’t you have more important things to worry about? Whether you’re in a local town, a state capital or Washington, methinks the answer to that question is “yes.” There are staggering debts everywhere, which we’re expecting our grandchildren’s grandchildren to pay off. There’s talk about nationalizing healthcare, which the House of Representatives gleefully voted “yes” to last weekend like the cat that just ate the canary. There are our brave men and women in uniform, fighting overseas for reasons we’re not really sure about, and some people are trying to figure whether or not we should bring them home.

These issues aren’t just for the seemingly far-off folks on Capitol Hill; they touch us closer to home also…including those in Howard County. I would guess these topics would carry more urgency than putting a simple ban on underage tanning.

If anything, the teenagers of Howard County, Maryland ought to use this issue as a civics lesson. It’s classic example of how government works…err, doesn’t work. And they ought to follow the example from their older fellow Americans across the country, who’ve hosted many a town hall debate about healthcare over the last few months. Why not host a town hall with their local officials and get this law overturned? This is America, the last time I checked. We CAN repeal laws…look at how we used the 21st Amendment to repeal the 18th.

Also, this should serve as a warning to those same teenagers that government likes to slowly slither its way into our private lives and try to control them, one little bit at a time. Next thing you know, it’ll write laws forbidding grocery stores to sell candy and other types of junk food. Or requiring people to only drive their cars are certain hours of the day. Need I go further with my examples?

It’s just a bad idea to ban those under 18 from using tanning beds…in Howard County or any other locale. It’s just another example of government extending itself, and it doesn’t promote personal responsibility on the part of the private citizen.

Sincerely,
Adam Hopkins

November 12, 2009

Tanning Ban Is More Than Skin Deep in Restricting Rights was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Friday, October 30, nine (9!) banks failed and were taken-over by the FDIC. That brought the total bank failures to 115 so far in 2009. This number of failures hasn’t been exceeded since 1992 AND we still have two months to go in 2009 to probably set an all-time record. What a wonderful record at which to look forward.

Not to worry, though. U.S. Bancorp bought all nine of the failed banks. Specifically, they picked up $18.4 billion in assets and $15.4 billion in deposits. The bankrupt FDIC picked up the losses. Is this a great system, or what?

We haven’t even begun to recover from the imbecilic big-bank shenanigans of the recent past; yet here we are creating still more “Too-Big-To-Fail” banks.

Excuse me but if big banks created the problems were now facing, wouldn’t it be a tad more prudent to, say, limit the size any one bank could attain? Hello Barney, Chris – anyone home?

Oh, I forgot. On Friday, Barney Frank did address the problem. He decreed that the TBTF banks would henceforth be charged a “fee” during good times in order to cover potential losses during bad times as the TBTF bank problems are unwound.  I guess size does matter. Apparently all this will be done in secret:

A. There will be a secret club of financial institutions that will be considered “Too-Big-To-Fail.” So if you’re a member, what incentive do you have to act in a prudent manner? Do you not, in fact, now have a license to steal? Can you not do any foolish thing you wish? You know you’d be punished if you simply acted prudently but would benefit with a bailout if your wild schemes failed. Moral hazard? Naw!

B. The public will not be informed of who the members of this private club are. And you thought you had some semblance of privacy in financial matters? The FED still refuses to identify which banks were subjected to the so-called “Stress Test.” Why should we be surprised that they won’t tell us the names of the TBTF club members?

C. A fund will be established by taxing these financial institutions in good times to pay the costs to protect them in the bad times. Anyone really think these fees will cover the bad times? Who will determine when the “good times” are here? And when there are insufficient funds in the kitty, guess who will pay the difference? Moral hazard? Naw! License to steal? From guess whom?

D. The Federal Reserve will have the power to determine and therefore change what the definition of “solvency” is. Oh great, try playing the game when the ground rules keep changing. I’m going to take my bat and ball and go home now!

Did it occur to you that, by omission, the Too-Small-To-Matter banks will continue to be thrown to the wolves? Let’s see; we make big banks even bigger but we close small banks and merge them into already big banks making the big banks even bigger. Figures! First we experience a meltdown in our banking system due to too much debt. We then “solve” the problem by creating still more debt. Part of the fallout of the banking collapse was that we were told we had banks that were too-big-to-fail. Now we “solve” this problem by creating still more and even bigger too-big-to-fail banks? Wow! The logic underwhelms me. Next time my house catches on fire, I guess I’ll try pouring gasoline on it to extinguish the fire. Well, water is just “so-yesterday” a solution. Might as well be innovative.

Currently on the front burner is CIT Financial. Here is an institution that services Middle-American business. CIT apparently no longer qualifies as a TBTF bank, even though they did receive over $2 billion in bailout money a year ago. As a result, CIT finds itself in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings. The intent is reorganization under Chapter 11. Regardless of the outcome, small and medium-sized business will suffer. The Wall Street Journal estimates that perhaps only 20% of the prior level of financial services will be available, and that’s “IF” CIT is successful in reorganization. At best, it’s obvious that any attempt to replace these lost “services” will require much higher financial credit-worthiness and there will be fewer funds available for this process. Well…the TBTF banks have all the money so what’s left for small and medium-sized business? Now tell me this isn’t a License To Steal? Can you estimate how many small and medium sized businesses will be forced into bankruptcy? That really helps our recovery-NOT. Small business creates 90% of the new jobs Obama keeps looking for but, hey, why worry? Privatize the profits and socialize the losses. Just keep the big boys happy.

Every economic problem we face can be directly traced back to the Federal government and the interfering laws that they continuously pass. Remember the Resolution Trust Corp. back in the 1980s? It became “necessary” to bail out the Savings & Loan industry because so many of the S&Ls gambled wildly with their depositors’ money. Sound familiar? How could the S&Ls of the 1980s and the too-big-to-fail banks of the 00s make such horrible business decisions? Were/Are the management teams just stupid or are they also incompetent?

Consider this: We’ve had a 115 bank failures just this year. Are you worried? Why not? Oh, your account is insured. By whom? So when the management of the bank that controls your deposits makes stupid business decisions, you don’t care? The FDIC will bailout your account. Not only that, the “insured” amount was increased from a “mere” $100,000 per account to $250,000 this year (this extra coverage expires at the end of 2013 and reverts back to the $100,000 figure in 2014 as currently scheduled). Do you see a slight problem here? Isn’t the FDIC just another government agency that gives the banks a License To Steal?

Just for giggles, suppose there were no FDIC and your deposits at any bank or S&L were simply not insured. Would you then perhaps have a slightly different outlook as to the safety of your money? Would you perhaps behave somewhat differently when selecting a bank in which to deposit your funds? Why? Do you now see that the FDIC is a Federal Government sponsored insurance scheme to protect you from greedy and stupid bankers? Or do you perhaps see that the FDIC actually facilitates excessive risk-taking on the part of the bankers since they have nothing to loose? Do you suppose there might be a slight moral hazard hiding somewhere in this mix? If the bank did not have the FDIC insuring your deposit and that same bank had to compete in the open, free market for your deposit account, would you suppose that the bank management might behave in a slightly more conservative manner? Wouldn’t you behave in a slightly more conservative manner when selecting a bank?

What’s to restrain the management of those banks today? If they mess-up, the government will protect them. And as we’ve all observed, the very folks that made the stupid and reckless business decisions will still get their multi-million-dollar bonus.’ Would you be willing to make a wild guess that maybe there is a slight moral hazard hiding somewhere in this scheme? Isn’t that a License To Steal?

You don’t want to hear this, but you and I are responsible. Yes we are. We grumble about politicians and yet we continue to re-elect the same folks who continuously lie to us. They tell us what they think we want to hear, and then go do whatever they want. As Walt Kelly’s eminent philosopher of the 1960s, Pogo, opined, “We have met the enemy and they is us.” Don’t we rationalize that “our representative is okay but it’s the other guy’s rep that needs to be voted-out? Well guess what? Our rep needs to go, too. They all need to go. We don’t need term limits. We just need the gumption to vote “no” every time we see the term “incumbent” after a candidate’s name. It’s that simple. I’d guess that the message would be heard loud-and-clear very quickly. Isn’t it about time we put an end to what seems to be an unlimited License To Steal?

Regards,
Tex Norton

November 3, 2009

Bankster’s Cartel: Licensed to Steal was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” I’ve said many times during this narrative of the life and wars of General Curtis Lemay (1906-1990). And when the hour has passed? Well, so passes the man, one might think.

But the muse of history seldom lets go of a good story. Recall, as I’ve counseled before, the first words of Virgil’s Aneid. “Arma virumque cano.” I sing of arms and the man. Though time and history overtake the man of the hour, can he ever really exit the stage?

In the last article, about Lemay and what he told President Lyndon Johnson, we left the general as he retired from the Air Force in 1965 and moved to the tony Bel Aire section of Los Angeles. Lemay took a good job with a fine technology firm. He and Mrs. Lemay settled in, and — it being Los Angeles in the mid-1960s — life was good.

1968 – Vietnam

But time passes, and by 1968 Lemay was frustrated with the direction that the U.S. was taking. The country’s social fabric was fraying. There were riots on college campuses, as well as in the streets of major cities. What was happening to the nation that Lemay had served for his entire career?

Much of the national discord crystallized around opposition to the war in Vietnam. It’s certainly fair to say that Lemay’s frustration came from watching the Johnson administration bungle the fight. And this was no abstract or academic matter to the old bomber pilot from Ohio.

That is, in 1964 Johnson rejected the military advice of his Air Force Chief of Staff, a certain General named Curtis Lemay. Lemay counseled Johnson that if the U.S. was going to fight the North Vietnamese — a big “if,” in Lemay’s view — then the U.S. needed to hit North Vietnam hard and up front with air power. “Throw a punch that really hurts,” said Lemay, and wreck the means by which North Vietnam was waging war against South Vietnam.

This advice was not what Johnson wanted to hear. Instead, Johnson and his counselors escalated the war gradually, on land, sea and in the air, and by 1968 waged it to a bloody stalemate. (“I g****m told you so,” Lemay surely thought.)

Strategy, Operations and Logistics

There were many reasons, at many levels, for what happened in Vietnam. First of all, at the strategic level, the North Vietnamese Communists actually knew what they wanted and what they were doing. The North Vietnamese were serious students of the theory of war, from Sun Tzu to Mao Zedong. They had a plan and an end-game, and it was all quite simple. It was to unite North and South Vietnam into one large, Communist state.

At the operational level, the North Vietnamese also had a thoughtful plan to implement their strategy. They took massive aid from the Soviet Union, Peoples’ Republic of China, and other like-thinking Communist and Socialist nations. Well-armed by the outsiders, the North Vietnamese intended to pour troops and equipment into the South, build up forces and capabilities, and fight for as long as it took to prevail.

What would it take to prevail? In one word, logistics. “In large part the history of the (Vietnam) war,” wrote U.S. intelligence analyst Cynthia Grabo in her insightful book Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning (Defense Intelligence Agency, 2004), “was a chronicle of ingenious and unrelenting North Vietnamese efforts to sustain their logistic movements and of our (U.S.) attempts to disrupt them.”

It gets back to the old military saying that amateurs study battles, while professionals study logistics. Lemay’s advice to Johnson had been to “disrupt them” by bombing North Vietnamese supplies at the source. Kill the logistics, and you kill the enemy’s ability to wage war.

Thus in 1964 Lemay presented Johnson with a plan to bomb the ports of North Vietnam, and mine the harbors through which Soviet and other Communist-bloc aid poured into North Vietnam. Lemay advised mining the coastline to prevent infiltration. Lemay also advised destroying North Vietnamese oil supplies at the storage facilities.

Johnson did none of this. Instead, Johnson’s operational plan was to bomb the jungle trails, through which North Vietnamese supplies and troops poured south. At the end of the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, Johnson’s operational plan was to “disrupt” North Vietnamese efforts via direct action against an armed invasion force. It was as if someone was squirting you with a fire hose. But rather than turn off the hose at the source, you stood there trying to soak up the water with a towel.

To top it off, Johnson pursued his operational plan gradually. Johnson escalated the Vietnam war slowly. In particular, there was on-and-off bombing, punctuated by well-publicized “pauses.” While the aircraft were chained down, the North Vietnamese rearmed their gun pits and recalibrated their antiaircraft tracking radars.

A Proxy War, a Long War, and Many Mistakes

In the larger scheme of things, the Vietnam war was a proxy war. Other powers — Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, Cuba, China, et al. — waged war against the U.S.

North Vietnam was the proxy in this proxy war, of course. But the prize was conquering the South and defeating the U.S. So the North Vietnamese were OK with their role.

Indeed, the North Vietnamese “gradually” adapted to the gradual war escalation of the Johnson administration. The Northerners dug in and took their hits. They wanted to win. They were patient and ruthless. In a war, that helps.

On the U.S. side there were fundamental misperceptions and misunderstandings. At many levels of command – starting in the Oval Office and moving down the chain — there were geostrategic blunders, strategic errors, operational miscalculations and tactical mistakes.

After he retired, whenever Lemay was asked for his opinion on how the war was playing out, he answered honestly and with characteristic bluntness. Primarily, Lemay criticized Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his crew of “whiz kids” at the Pentagon. The McNamara team was “mirror-imaging” its values onto the North. For as smart as they were — and many dripped with academic wax and ribbons — these geniuses couldn’t make hard choices. They let things drag out.

For most Americans, by 1968 the central point of the Vietnam war was that it was a televised meat grinder, killing hundreds of U.S. soldiers per week. The war cost untold billions and wrecked both the U.S. military, and the larger American economy, from the inside out. So much for Johnson’s “coonskin” that he was going to “nail to the wall.”

The U.S., Painted into a Corner

The year 1968 was a historical tipping point for the U.S. and the Vietnam War. It started with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, in January and February. Overall, the Tet campaign was a battlefield defeat for the Communists. But the Tet Offensive crystallized one overarching idea inside the head of many an American. The Vietnam War had lasted too long and cost too much.

As the Tet fighting wound down, U.S. leadership and decision-making was paralyzed, starting with the top echelons of the Johnson administration. It dawned on the U.S. political classes that they were painted into a corner. The historical record is that Americans will fight a war. But not a long war.

By stringing out the Vietnam fighting over many years, Johnson had squandered the political will of the nation. Where could the U.S. go from here? Who could untie this Gordian knot? The battleground of the Vietnam War spread to U.S. campuses and streets. It was a mess.

A Year of Living Dangerously

Add to this, that the nation was living dangerously. On the worst day of the Vietnam war, there was never a military threat from Hanoi against the U.S. homeland, or towards U.S. allies in Europe and Asia outside Indochina.

But from what Lemay knew – and he knew a lot because he received regular classified briefings as a courtesy extended to a former Air Force Chief of Staff — the Soviets were building a powerful nuclear force with which to challenge the West. At the strategic level there was a “breakout” in the making.

In Lemay’s opinion, with the focus on Vietnam and the accompanying policy paralysis, the bulk of the policy-making class in Washington was oblivious to the Soviet nuclear threat. (Looking ahead to the 1970s, a Soviet nuclear breakout occurred. The top echelons of the U.S. political-media classes eventually figured it out, for the most part — except for some of the supremely stupid ones.)

On March 31, 1968 Johnson announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection. At the national level the Democratic Party descended into chaos. By August the Democrats pulled their party together and nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey as their candidate for president.

Lemay knew Humphrey, but didn’t trust him because of events that dated back to Lemay’s Air Force tenure during the Johnson presidency. “I thought that Humphrey was as big a liar as Johnson,” remarked Lemay at one point.

The Republicans in turn nominated Richard Nixon, with whom Lemay had worked during the Eisenhower administration when Nixon was Vice President. Nixon had his flaws, Lemay thought, but at least he understood foreign and military affairs.

George C. Wallace

In response to the Vietnam War, and a long list of other national issues, a relatively obscure, but smooth-talking lawyer named George C. Wallace (1919 – 1998) appeared on the national horizon.

Wallace had served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He was part of the 20th Air Force under Lemay in the Pacific, although then-Gen. Lemay and then-Staff Sergeant Wallace never met. After the war Wallace returned to his native Alabama and made a career in politics. By 1968 Wallace was a former governor of Alabama, and his wife Lurleen held the job after Wallace could not run due to term limits.

Wallace offered a Southern-fried version of segregationist populism. Wallace preyed on the social and economic fears of lower-class and working-class white people. Wallace particularly touched nerves with peoples’ fear of the unfolding civil rights movement.

“When I talk about roads and schools,” Wallace once remarked, “nobody cares. But when I talk about black people moving in down the street, people listen real hard.” On this point, Wallace made political hay out of federal efforts to integrate the races. In one famous comment about federal efforts to promote racial integration, Wallace stated “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties.”

Wallace believed that there was a market for his brand of political moonshine outside of Alabama. Hence in 1968 Wallace campaigned as a third-party candidate for president. In order to qualify for the ballot in most states, Wallace needed a running mate.

Wallace went through a long list of possibilities for VP. All of the candidates turned him down, including a private citizen living in Los Angeles named Curtis Lemay, Gen., USAF, Retired.

Vice Presidential Candidate

But Wallace pressed on. He needed somebody to balance the ticket and get on the ballot in most states. And oh, Wallace was smooth. He was slick. He could turn on the charm.

In one call after another, Wallace urged Lemay to become the VP candidate. Wallace enticed Lemay with the idea of speaking to a national audience. Lemay could help, said Wallace, with getting out the message to resolve the Vietnam War. Lemay could focus on national security and defense preparedness.

Finally in October, towards the end of the 1968 campaign, Lemay rose to Wallace’s bait. The reason? In September Lemay learned that, if elected, Nixon planned to negotiate over “arms control” with the Soviets. Lemay didn’t trust the Soviets to negotiate in good faith. Lemay believed that the Soviets would wage a propaganda battle. The Reds would talk nice and smile in public, and then build nuclear missiles in secret. (This is exactly what happened.)

Lemay disagreed profoundly with the direction in which he believed Nixon was heading. So in early October, about 30 days before the election, Lemay agreed to be Wallace’s running mate. Many members of Lemay’s family were shocked. Old friends and colleagues could scarcely believe the news. What the hell was Lemay doing?

Irony of ironies, it’s fair to say that George Wallace was soon shocked as well. From Lemay’s very first day on the ticket, the old warhorse started discussing the possibility of “thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.” Huh? People couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Say again? Sure enough, there was Lemay on national television, talking about “radioactive crabs” at the nuclear testing site at Bikini Atoll. Say what?

Lemay Was No Politician

It dawned on Wallace – too late – that Lemay was no tub-thumping, stump-talking, man-of-the-people politician. Not only was Lemay no politician, but he was reverting to his inner-SAC general. Lemay went out on the campaign trail to meet the voters, but he acted more like he was giving a seminar about nuclear war at the RAND Corp.

For all his image as the gruff, profane war-general, Lemay was an exceedingly intelligent man. When it came to airplanes and weapons, he knew his stuff. Actually, he knew his stuff inside out, down to the last technical detail.

It came naturally for Lemay to talk like he was running a SAC staff meeting, where his targeting cells planned the nuclear strike packages. Even worse for the Wallace campaign, Lemay wouldn’t shut up. Nuclear war? Lemay was an expert. Lemay wrote the book on nuclear war — several of ‘em, in fact, and all classified. Sweet Jesus! Now Lemay was talking up a nuclear storm. And the press loved it.

But could nuclear war really be a campaign issue? This was hardly the kind of thing the American people wanted to hear during a presidential election. In every election, as the saying goes, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But in 1968 there was more on the national plate. Vietnam and civil rights worried people — and angered a lot of them. A candidate could talk about those topics out on the campaign trail. Nuclear war, however, was over the top. That scared the voters.

Furthermore, many public opinion surveys indicated that the core of Wallace’s supporters – his political base — were former enlisted soldiers from World War II and Korea. And here was Wallace, the former staff sergeant, choosing a retired general officer as his running mate. It didn’t balance.

Wallace’s ploy backfired. While many Americans admired Lemay the war hero, many old troopers didn’t like him on first principles. Wallace’s political problem boiled down to the fact that Lemay was a general. In the minds of many old soldiers, he was one of those “brass hats” who made their lives miserable for several years during the war. (Many old soldiers did like Lemay, to be sure. Particularly the troops who served with him. Many of “Lemay’s boys” revered their former boss.)

And the train rolled on. Throughout October 1968, the Wallace-Lemay ticket fell in the polls. By Election Day in November, the Wallace-Lemay ticket was adrift. Wallace-Lemay picked up a lot of votes, and even won entire states in the South — which broke the back of a century of Democrat political dominance in Old Dixie. But at the end of the day, Nixon was the one.

Tarred By Association

Lemay was a national political candidate for all of about a month. In his entire life, he never planned to enter politics – and it showed. Yet there was something worse for Lemay than losing his one and only election. He was instantly tarred with the label of racism that accompanied much of Wallace’s political baggage. The media-historical complex promptly turned its darkest lights onto Lemay. Now it was Lemay’s turn to get firebombed.

After a mere 30 days on the campaign trail, Lemay’s career and accomplishments of almost 40 years went down the memory-hole. Lemay’s long list of accomplishments was replaced by the simple notation that he was “George Wallace’s running mate.” Period.

Lemay Confined WHO to Quarters?

By all accounts Lemay was a tough-as-nails general, but entirely fair-minded and non-biased over issues of race. During World War II in England, for example, Lemay went out of his way to ensure that black troops in the then-segregated Army had access to the same opportunities for housing, food, recreation, training and advancement as did the white troops. One time when Lemay learned that there was a racial fight off base, he confined all the WHITE troops to quarters.

Lemay did much the same thing with black troops in the 20th Air Force in the South Pacific. Everyone got a fair shake from Lemay. He judged people by work ethic and performance.

Pres. Harry Truman officially desegregated the U.S. military in 1948. And during Lemay’s tenure at SAC, in the years after 1948, he made great strides in recruiting and training black personnel to work on and fly the world’s most advanced bomber fleet. Indeed, Lemay was a leader in implementing the Truman desegregation order.

There’s no body of evidence that Lemay shared Wallace’s racial views. But still, Lemay ran on Wallace’s presidential ticket. He spent a month talking about Vietnam and the Soviet military threat. Then the election was over and Lemay returned to private life.

Footnotes to 1968

There’s a short footnote to the story. In 1969, newly-elected Pres. Nixon ordered an IRS audit of Lemay’s taxes, just to send a message. Typical Nixon.

Oh, and there’s one more footnote. In 1972, Nixon implemented Lemay’s old plan to bomb the tar out of North Vietnam and wreck the logistics effort at the source. For about two weeks in December, near 200 heavy bombers of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) — B-52s commissioned by Lemay, with pilots trained and doctrine designed by Lemay — pounded targets in North Vietnam. The effort was called Linebacker II. By the end of the Linebacker II, the North Vietnamese came to the peace table and made a serious effort to end their battle with the U.S.

According to accounts by American prisoners held captive in North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese could not believe that the U.S. had such awesome firepower as SAC delivered, yet had not used it earlier in the war. One North Vietnamese officer told an American prisoner, “If we knew you could have done this to us, we would never have fought against you. Why did your government wait so long?” Why indeed?

Thanks for reading. Until we meet again…

Byron W. King

November 2, 2009

The Life and Wars of General Curtis Lemay, Part V: Vietnam, Wallace and Nuclear War was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

I queried the ranger, “Why NOT feed the animals. It looks like they could use a bit of food.”

The ranger replied, “Well, there are MANY reasons. One reason is that we have many visitors here each year. If all the visitors routinely fed the animals, they would grow quite fat. Also, they would not have to forage for their food, and would become dependent upon the visitors for food. They would ‘forget’ how to forage for themselves and lose their independence. Not only that, but they learn to eschew their natural food and prefer ‘human’ food—which is not healthy for them. Also, since they don’t forage, they don’t get exercise, they develop health problems, and die early because of the improper diet and lack of exercise.

“If they become accustomed to being fed by the visitors, they will EXPECT to be fed by the visitors. As such, any visitor that did NOT give them food would disappoint them. A disappointed animal is a dangerous animal. The animal might well attack to secure the food to which he expects and believes he is ‘entitled’. This is not particularly hazardous if the animal is a squirrel—a bear is another story. Raccoons “vandalizing” garbage cans are quite common.

“If visitors were allowed to give out food, animals from all over would migrate here. The area would be overrun with various animals—which would lead to territorial fights among the animals. As more and more animals migrated and the supply of food remained constant, the animals would become very aggressive in their demands for food.

“Feeding such animals is fine if they are in some form of ‘captivity’, where the amount and type of food can be controlled, but it is not a good idea to feed such animals in the wild when they are free—particularly when the type and amount of food cannot be controlled.

“If an animal is injured in some manner, we often take them in and care for them and feed them—but it is strictly a temporary measure. We cut them off from dependency as soon as possible and place them back in their natural habitat.”

I asked the ranger if it wasn’t something like a “co-alcoholic”—a person that lives with and/or supports an alcoholic in his behavior. The support may be financial or moral or other, but it allows the alcoholic to continue to lead a destructive life. I asked, “When we feed the animals, is it that we do it to ‘feel good’ about OURSELVES that we are doing ‘something charitable’ by feeding the animals, when in fact we are doing great damage to their lives?”

The ranger agreed with me and said that in his opinion I was correct.

I left the park thinking about what I had seen and my conversation with the ranger. As I drove out the park entrance, a “street person” was there with a “please help” sign. I reached for my wallet for some money to assist this person in need when I recalled my conversation with the ranger. In a moment of insight, it was clear to me that I should NOT give this person money. In doing so, I was simply allowing this person to lead the kind of life he was leading—I was being a “co-alcoholic”. I was “Feeding the animals”.

I did not give the person money. Instead, I thought about our whole welfare system and the way is works (or does NOT work). It became clear to me that we are encouraging generation after generation to become dependent. They are essentially a slave to the welfare system. In some sense, they are in captivity.

I thought about the “families” of three and four generations of welfare recipients—many obese—living in poverty; people that have been “trained” to ask for “handouts” and have never learned how to “forage” for themselves.

I thought about the people in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina that had no ability or desire to fend for themselves and simply waited for the government to provide a handout and save them.

I thought about the “migration” of welfare recipients to various states where the welfare benefits are most generous—in particular to major cities in certain states. (Where the various politicians court their votes.)

I thought about how, as more and more people are receiving “subsidies”, each segment becomes more and more aggressive in their “claim” to “their share”.

I thought about the “demands” of the welfare recipients, the riots, the “welfare rights” organizations, the demonstrations, the court cases, and thought, “The similarities are so great they cannot be ignored.”

I thought about the “War on Poverty”, and wondered about the “exit strategy”, or the “definition of victory”.

I thought about all these things and thought, “What have we done through a mistaken notion of benevolence? In a sense, we have not only accepted inappropriate behavior and dependency, but we have encouraged and solicited it for our own purposes. We have been ‘co-alcoholics’ to these people. We have not helped them; we have domesticated them.”

May God forgive us.

Regards,
Anthony De Maio

October 29, 2009

Please Don’t Feed the Animals was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Some 9,000 homes and lots went up for tax foreclosure auction in the American symbol of industrial urban failure…yet 80% of them remain unsold despite a minimum bid of $500.

How the world turns.

Once Detroit was a dynamic city, the urban equivalent perhaps of a can-do, modern woman, the kind who could have easily attracted money and devotion from deep-pocketed suitors.

But now the ol’ gal just ain’t what she used to be. “Motor City” must sting like an accusation. Her industries are gone and the political props have only prevented the sort of changes that she needed to retain her vitality.

Now she’s lost her looks…and her dignity…and the only ones willing to touch her aren’t willing to pay very much. But apparently a few banks are hoping to buy claims to pimp Detroit out, while making absolutely no investment in improving her lot.

“Critics say the poor showing at the auction underscores the limits of using a market-based system to clean up property tax problems.”

No kidding!

Critics are always blaming a market-based system…even when it was politics fighting the market that made things so bad in the first place. And God forbid that the market tries to clean things up.

There are plenty of people who would love to buy Motor City’s properties cheap and actually move into the city…but the banks keep outbidding them for the decent properties.

The banks, of course, are hoping to make a quick profit…but property prices improve only when the right kind of productive, mindful people move in and form strong local economies.

By buying up the properties, banks are pricing out precisely the kind of people who would make their investments pay off!

I suspect the banks believe that they can simply count on the government kicking off another real estate bubble with the old bag of tricks: by manipulating interest rates and the cost of money and debt. And who can blame them?

We’ve all been conditioned to believe that politics will trump markets forever, that the universe runs on votes instead of physics. Things will–predictably–get worse until this belief is temporarily wrung out of our collective consciousness.

In the meantime, consider homesteading in Detroit. In a little while, the banks will have lost their taste for speculation…along with another chunk of taxpayer money.

Living in Detroit would be rough at first, like living on the frontier full of hostile natives: Mad Max meets the Ol’ West. And it may not pay off. Cities do die occasionally, you know.

But that’s what smart investment is all about. The gains are puny when the chances of success are high. If risk has its rewards, then Detroit’s abandoned streets may be hiding gold under the grit.

Regards,
Gary Gibson
Managing Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

October 26, 2009

Detroit Real Estate: Down and Out at Market Value was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Justice Little, Editor of Taipan Daily, also out of the AF stable, says that 26 M jobs have been lost.

The Federal Government says that the unemployment rate is 9.8%.  Traditional methods of accounting make the answer right at twice that much, recognizing that people are still jobless even though they have exhausted (expanded) unemployment compensation or been on the rolls more than six months.

Another source claims one million jobs were lost last month, as opposed to the government reports which will fluctuate for a while and finally show up on the back pages as 475,000 again, at a good guess.

Rocket scientists used slipsticks and Cray computers which have been replaced by fancier models, while split second “trades” are executed algorithmically on the floor of the stock exchange to garner half a cent a share, but let’s get back to good old tried and true methods which don’t even require an abacus.

If there are 130 M jobs, net, in the USA (rounding slightly to keep the arithmetic simple), and 25,000,000 have been lost (again, rounding to keep matters simple) then we can either say that the job market has shrunk on the close order of twenty per cent. (a ploy the government should have thought of but didn’t, and if we go with 26 M that is precisely 20% of 130M), or we can say that the jobless rate is approximately twenty per cent., which is exactly the same result I got when I told you in the second paragraph what the true rate probably is.  Inconvenient truths do not really disappear just because someone mumbles mystical new accounting parameters.

It is possible that the wizards were trying to tell us that there are currently 131M jobs in the USA, down from a previous high of 157M.  In that case, the job loss is 26/157 which is an awkward number to reduce by division while typing, so let’s multiply, instead.  The figure is one-sixth, almost exactly.  (6 x 26 = 120 + 36 = 156.  That is definitely close enough for government work.)

By that view, 15% + 1.66% (a quick way to deduce 1/6, since multiplication is far simpler than its upside down view, division.  Perhaps no one ever told you that, or that addition is only backwards subtraction.)  = 15.66 % total destruction of the portion of the economy known as employment.  That is even worse news than that 20% of those who need jobs can’t get them.  It means that a sixth of our economy has disappeared to foreign lands or been destroyed by the fall of the stock market, banking instutions, and real estate.

Even a large factory starting up isn’t going to produce more than a few thousand jobs (and it is not guaranteed to succeed, particularly with such horrors as cap and tax, more regulation, and the guarantee of many other new taxes ahead of us), and who has the capital for such an undertaking, other than foreigners with a surfeit of falling dollars?  Do we really want an economy dependent upon the good will of those chortling over the demise of the dollar as the reserve currency?  I guess assorted governments in Washington this century shouldn’t have borrowed so much money from them.  They did, though, and in some ways the best thing that could happen is for the whole sleazy fraud of fiat currency and the Fed to crash around their deserving ears.

It is possible to jigger figures in any number of entertaining ways, but that won’t change the facts.  All it does is disguise them and lead to more palatable annual corporate reports and soothing statements from Bernanke, Geithner, and Obama.  If our measure of “recovery” is getting back to the slippery ground we were on five years ago–not a pleasant place to stand, as events have revealed–then it follows that 25,000,000 jobs must be created, one or a few at a time.  These cannot be temporary jobs, such as census workers or seasonal workers; that is the equivalent of putting a bandaid on a ruptured appendix and saying that time will heal it.  Time is going to cause us to bleed out and die of septicemia if we don’t do some surgery, here.

Mind, all creating twenty-five million real jobs in manufacturing, construction, agriculture, and education would do is restore the status quo ante.  As daunting a task as that would be, it would not solve the problem; it would merely stanch the bleeding.  Until we work our way through the devastation of all the bubbles there is no way to clear the decks for rebuilding.

I don’t think it can be done.  I’m feeling nautical, so let’s say that we have been hulled between wind and water.  Our masts are down in a tangle of rigging, the sheets are snapped and tangled, and our lower decks are awash in blood and loose cannons rolling over the wounded.  All the surgeon has in his chest is salt and rough canvas.  In this case, Geithner and Bernanke are terrified of using the bone saw.

Oh, occasionally the Captain and senior officers will throw a bank overboard, but pretty much the fix is in for those who are connected.  We are witnessing the greatest transfer of wealth in the last two hundred and 233 years, and it is all going to special interest groups.  Other than what they dole out on luxury goods and buying more power that money is not going back into the economy to create new businesses or expand old ones which is the only way that genuine, long-lasting, productive jobs come into being.

Can there be a recovery without jobs?  Of all the idiotic suppositions that only Keynesians would promulgate!  Of course not, any more than those who are not employed can pay bills, eat, and provide tax recovery.

Jobs are not an intangible, save in one increasingly dangerous sense.  Jobs must produce something.  By its very definition, a job is labor which produces something the employer wants more than he wants or needs his money.  It always seems to surprise Statists, but the purpose of business is to create profits, not to create products, and certainly not to create jobs; indeed, technology is reducing the need for human workers, to the understandable delight of entrepreneurs.  Creating profits involves risk, forethought, knowledge (or hired experience), and it isn’t something just anyone can do.  In particular, it is not something which can be done under shackling regulations, increased taxes and cost, insecurity over fuel availability, and capricious governments dedicated to non-science and paying off themselves and open-handed constituents.

The biggest problem I see is not fiat money (which is collapsing from its own lack of substance), or the purported “global” economy, which is composed of numerous countries none of whom are doing well.  (Prosperity in China?  Oh, my, tell me another one.)  The big problem, which is being exacerbated, is that something like 40% of all “jobs” are in government.  Yup.  Four out of every ten “workers” are paid lavishly (in general, twice what counterparts in business make for similar tasks) are engaged primarily in the business of making our lives more difficult, our businesses less profitable, and our ability to plan for the future almost impossible.  This country has grown bureaucracy and chased manufacturing jobs off shore.  It has increased regulation and deleterious “services” at the expense of freedom and capital to create real business which include real jobs and genuine products which can be sold instead of buying shoddy merchandise from China.  We’ve seen the cycle…from Taiwan to Japan to Sri Lanka, and now to China.  We have sent our money overseas for many decades rather than fight to reduce regulation, reduce taxes, and reduce costs.  A fork lift operator simply isn’t worth $86,000 a year, even if he works for the ci devant “Big Three.”  Not many of them do any more, and it serves them right.  Greed at all levels of the unions  made American products too expensive to buy.  Manufacturers–whom, I will remind you again, are not in business to employ “workers,” but to make profits–picked up their blueprints and went elsewhere.  We cannot blame them.  We would do the same if we were able.

No, friends, there will be no “jobless” recovery.  There will be no recovery at all until we are so much farther down that October of 2009 looks like “the good old days.”  The “green shoots” are the slime growing up the North wall of government, the bacteria of corruption, and of parasites such as governmental Spanish Moss and Pharma and Agribiz mistletoe.

What is to be done?  You’ve got your choice.  Destroy Carthage, or opt out.  Pull back into your own perimeter.  Produce nothing that can be taxed or regulated.

That’s what we have come to.  State revenues are down 17%, which looks like a pretty close correlation of 1:1 for enterprise destruction and joblessness both.  Every job destroyed is another blow at the Nanny State which cannot survive without continuous economic growth, because such as they never curtail their own spending and urge to shackle and harry those who produce the funds upon which Statists thrive.  Perhaps you are not in a position to do so, but if you are…just quit.  This isn’t new advice; Ayn Rand gave it to you sixty years ago.  Do not lend credence to your oppressors and do not support them…and do not look for any genuine green shoots representing real growth any time soon.

Regards,
Linda Brady Traynham

October 19, 2009

The Jobless Recovery, So Called was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

There are so many questions. There are so many ways to explain things. And lately I’ve been looking at our modern world by focusing on the remarkable life of a relatively unknown man — unknown to most people of recent vintage, at least. Indeed, he’s been dead for 19 years, and he died at a ripe old age. Yet his legacy is still with us. I refer, of course, to General Curtis Lemay of the U.S. Air Force.

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” I noted in the previous articles. And the U.S. endured many hard hours during the Second World War and the Cold War. In the worst hours of the most troubled times, Mars, the god of war, gave the U.S. Lemay, a knight of the sky. But knights need swords and steeds. In Roman mythology, Jupiter had Vulcan to forge mighty weapons. In mid-20th Century America, Lemay had a U.S. industrial base that could crank out big bombers.

In Lemay’s case, he had some very big bombers. With the big bombers of World War II, Lemay blasted Germany and burned Japan. With the bigger bombers of the Cold War, Lemay encircled the Soviet Union and kept the Red Army behind its own lines. Lemay’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) was critical to the Western doctrine of “containing” the Soviets. In the annals of American arms, Lemay was a mighty eagle with talons of hardened steel.

Pres. Johnson Chooses His Advice

But times change, and times changed in a big way after the death of Pres. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Vice Pres. Lyndon Johnson moved into the Oval Office.

One can ably argue that Johnson put his broad, Texas shoulders to history’s wheel, and set events in motion that created the modern world. Yet one can also capably argue that Johnson was rolled by history, like a drunk in the hands of a seasoned mugger.

One thing you cannot argue is that Johnson lacked choices and options. Because one of the privileges of the office of U.S. President was (and remains, of course) that the National Executive may choose his advisers. And when you choose your advisers, often as not you choose your advice.

Tough Advice from Lemay

From the Kennedy administration, Johnson inherited Lemay as Air Force Chief of Staff. As far as Johnson was concerned, the military man, Lemay, did not offer the kind of advice that the politician from Texas wanted to hear. In particular, Gen. Lemay gave Pres. Johnson politically tough advice about waging war in far distant Vietnam. Johnson, to be sure, needed a lot of advice on that subject.

That is, Vietnam was a complex place. Leaving aside most of the last thousand years of history, there was plenty of modern mischief in play. In the late 19th Century the French colonized Indochina and ran it until 1942. Then in World War II the Japanese Empire conquered the region and spoiled the party for the colonists. “Asia for the Asians,” said Japanese propaganda, expressing an idea — if not an ideal — that took deep roots despite the irony of Japanese lording it over Vietnamese.

Post-war, the French returned to rule. “Not so fast,” said many locals. Within a decade the French were defeated and driven out by Vietnamese nationalists and Communists. It was tough going. The main road through Vietnam was, in the words of professor Bernard Fall, a Street Without Joy.

The French defeat in 1953-1954 (or Hell in a Very Small Place, also by Bernard Fall) was followed by a north-south division and a festering civil war. The Communist North was slowly, but effectively, invading the South. There was much meddling by outside powers, to include the U.S. Indeed, the CIA — under orders from Pres. Kennedy — sponsored the murder of the president of South Vietnam. And that was just the start.

Lemay understood military power, but he also understood limits to power. Lemay told Johnson that it would be difficult and expensive to wage a defensive war in South Vietnam against Communist-armed insurgents, and regular troops from the North. Vietnam was at the tail end of U.S. logistical lines. It would take years for counter-insurgency operations to work – if they worked, and there was no assurance of that. Would the American people accept years of warfare in a distant land? Especially a land to which the U.S. had no longstanding historical attachments or vital national interests?

Bomb ‘Em? Well…

Sure, Lemay told Johnson – after Johnson asked – the U.S. could bomb Vietnam. But to be effective, the U.S. would have to “carry the war to the north, and really carry it there” (Lemay’s emphasis).

The way Lemay phrased it, if the U.S. decided to bomb Vietnam, “We must throw a punch that really hurts.” To Lemay’s way of thinking, this meant “Knock out all their (North Vietnamese) oil. … This immediately brings a lot of things to a halt.” This from the man whose bombers wrecked Germany’s liquid fuel production in World War II, thus grounding the Luftwaffe and stopping German tanks in their tracks.

Lemay also counseled Johnson to “(knock) out the harbor at Haiphong,” and mine the seacoast to halt weapons imports from the Soviet Union. This too was sound military advice from an experienced military man. Lemay’s historical parallel was what his B-29s had accomplished — and what had worked so well — in World War II against Japan.

Time Is No Ally in War

For all his gruff exterior, Lemay was an intelligent and serious man. He was a keen student of technology, and an even better judge of human ability. Lemay could (in fact, he did) hold his own in a discussion of the principles of radar with engineers from MIT. And the fact is that Lemay ensured the success of his own career, over 25 years in senior command positions, by selecting thousands of the right people and placing them into the toughest jobs in wars hot and cold.

Sure, Lemay had the outward, aggressive spirit of a bomber pilot. Heck, he WAS a bomber pilot. “I’ll tell you what war is about,” Lemay once said to Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb. “You’ve got to kill people. And when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

But as a military planner Lemay was deliberate. When it came to the business of fighting, Lemay the warrior believed in scrupulous training and exacting preparation, followed by speed and lethality in the execution.

It’s not just that Lemay was a zoom-zoom, go-fast airplane pilot. Silk scarf or no, in Lemay’s comments, writings and actions, he echoed military scholars from Sun Tzu to Carl von Clausewitz. Lemay understood that the essence of war was to prepare carefully and then act quickly and decisively to defeat an adversary. In warfare, time is no ally.

Clausewitz on War

Consider what Clausewitz wrote on the subject of war, for example. “In war more than anywhere else,” wrote the Prussian, “things do not turn out as we expect. Nearby they do not appear as they did from a distance.” Thus, per Clausewitz, it’s imperative to adapt to the enemy, hit hard, do your business and finish things rapidly. If not, then time degrades one’s ability to reach objectives. Don’t drag things out. “Everything in war is very simple,” said Clausewitz, “but the simplest thing is difficult.”

Damn right. Lemay could have told stories of how “simple” things become immensely complex in wartime. Like getting 500 bombers off the ground from multiple bases in England. Then rallying them over the North Sea. Then driving them in formation across hundreds of miles of defended airspace to bomb a target that’s obscured by clouds and smoke. Then bringing the aircraft home, through more flak and fighters, to land in a night-time fog. And accomplish it all within a drop-dead time-frame (literally) constrained by onboard fuel supplies. Simple, right?

Or if a skeptic fails to appreciate Clausewitz, perhaps the words of Clausewitz’s better-known opponent will work. “Ask me for anything,” Napoleon said to his subordinates during the Russian campaign. “Anything but time.” As he crossed the plains of Russia, Napoleon knew that there were time-imposed limits to weather, supplies, manpower and political will at home to support the expedition.

Thus it’s not difficult to understand the advice that Lemay offered to Johnson when the man in the Oval Office asked the Air Force chief for options. Lemay was blunt, as befits a scholar of warfare. “Apply whatever force it is necessary to employ,” he stated, “to stop things quickly. The main thing is to stop it (i.e., the North Vietnamese-backed insurgency). The quicker you stop it (Lemay’s emphasis), the more lives you save. … The quicker you complete the military action, the better for all concerned.”

Stating the Military Truth

Distilled to its essence, Lemay presented Johnson with a military campaign plan that also served as a strategy for confronting and defeating the North Vietnamese Communists. Lemay counseled that if the U.S. committed its armed forces to war — a presidential and Congressional decision, to be sure — then the troops should be authorized to move quickly and hit North Vietnam with everything, up front.

Lemay knew that the threat to South Vietnam was not a bunch of philosopher-farmers toiling out in the rice paddies, spouting Marxist drivel. The threat was not “agrarian reformers” who wore black pajamas.

No, the threat to South Vietnam was Soviet weaponry funneled into North Vietnam, and then shipped south to supply a well-trained invasion force. Thus Lemay’s war plan was to use U.S. air power to smash and strangle the logistical underpinnings of the slow Communist takeover of South Vietnam. Would it make the Soviets mad? Sure, but that was another issue — and it was what SAC was for.

In Lemay’s opinion, an air campaign against North Vietnamese harbors, and related mining campaign against the seacoast, would strike the North Vietnamese center of gravity.

Center of Gravity? Lemay offered Johnson a practical tutorial on pure Clausewitz, via overwhelming air power dropping steel rain on an adversary. It was the military truth, according to Lemay, and in this world very few people have the ability to state the military truth.

Looking for Different Advice

Unfortunately in this world, a lot of people don’t want to hear the truth, military or otherwise. Johnson was one of them. Johnson saw things differently. The U.S., of course, had immense military power at its disposal. But Johnson lacked the will to use it.

Johnson didn’t want to go all out against North Vietnam, and then have to explain to the voters why he was committing the nation to a large conventional war in a far off place. “I’m not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home,” said Johnson, “to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” No. Of course not.

Johnson saw his presidential legacy in a domestic political agenda. He was going to enact Medicare for senior citizens. He was going to build a “Great Society” at home. He was going to push for civil rights, and rebuild America’s cities from the inside out.

Johnson didn’t want to spend political capital waging a costly war in Asia. Sure, he was obliged to suck it up and confront Communism on the foreign front. There are some things that American presidents HAVE to do. But deep down, Johnson just wanted to cut a political deal with the North Vietnamese, not bomb them.

So Johnson needed different advice than what he was getting from Lemay. Johnson looked around and — it being Washington, D.C. — he found other advisers more to his liking.

Telling Johnson What He Wanted to Hear

The new counselors were no fools. Working for a U.S. President would be good for their careers. So they told Johnson that the U.S. didn’t have to make a rapid, costly, all-out bombing effort against North Vietnam. No need to bomb Haiphong, or mine the harbors, or seed the coastline with mines. Nope, not at all. Forget that center of gravity crap from Clausewitz. What the hell did Clausewitz know, anyhow?

No, said the new advisers to Johnson. There was another way. If Johnson would only pursue a strategy of turning the heat up gradually on North Vietnam, the Communists would change their ways. After all, weren’t the North Vietnamese rational people?

Moving step by step, said the new consiglieri, Johnson could escalate on the cheap until he found just the right level of force at which the Vietnamese opponent would bend to his Texas-sized will. Now THAT was the kind of advice Johnson wanted to hear.

In short, Johnson looked at the complexity of Vietnam. He had a difficult set of choices, and wanted to make it all easy. Johnson wanted to “do Vietnam,” but on the cheap. In one memorable use of his astonishing powers of rhetoric, Johnson referred to Vietnam as a “coonskin.” And he wanted to “nail it to the wall.”

Lemay, the old World War II bomber-general, just didn’t fit into Johnson’s inspired vision for confronting and defeating the North Vietnamese. Hit them hard, up front? Not when you could hit them less hard, and escalate gradually. To Johnson, at least, it made sense. Johnson heard what he wanted to hear. Johnson saw what he wanted to see. Thus in the ancient ways of Washington, Lemay’s clock ran out.

Ushered into Retirement

Johnson kept Lemay on the Air Force payroll through 1964, always with an eye on the upcoming election in November. Even before the nominating conventions, Johnson had a hunch that he would be running against Barry Goldwater. Johnson used the FBI and CIA to dig up dirt to use against Goldwater. Basically, Johnson was paranoid about the election, and he didn’t want Lemay to retire and campaign alongside the old Army pilot from Arizona.

But after the election, in early 1965, Johnson was long past listening to Lemay talk about massive bombing of North Vietnam. So Johnson told his war-bird to retire as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force.

Oh sure, it was Lemay’s time to go, everyone agreed. He’d had a long career. It was time for Lemay to hang up the uniform and, as the saying goes, “spend more time with his family.” Yes. Sure.

In true Washington fashion, there was a splendid farewell ceremony. Everyone smiled. The troops paraded. The brass shone. There were fine speeches. The Air Force Band played ruffles and flourishes. Thundering jets roared overhead. Pres. Johnson pinned a medal on Lemay’s chest – as if Lemay needed any more medals. Lemay’s “faithful, zealous and obedient service to America” was “gratefully acknowledged and deeply appreciated.”

And then Lemay passed to others the baton of war and peace. Lemay didn’t mind, or so he said. He had groomed many a capable successor within the ranks of the Air Force. It was time for Lemay to pack up and get out of Washington.

Lemay left town. He went west and took a job in Los Angeles. He settled into private life. Indeed, Gen. and Mrs. Lemay even bought a lovely home in upscale Bel Aire. (Bel Aire? An eyebrow rises at that one.) Things were going well, except for that issue about “gradual escalation” over in Vietnam.

We’ll never know about the advice “not taken.” But we can ponder the “what ifs.” In another article, I’ll discuss Lemay’s post-retirement life, including his 30-day candidacy for U.S. Vice President in 1968. Thanks for reading.

Until we meet again,
Byron King

October 12, 2009

The Life and Wars of General Curtis Lemay, Part IV: Vietnam and President Johnson was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

“Colleges have forgotten that their primary tasks are to give students a framework to organize and correlate data on, and to teach them how to think for themselves and find their own information.”

The other night my wife Jennifer and I were walking our normal circuit of 3-5 miles, when we started on the topic of information, and the lack of skills our children exhibit when trying to locate or use it.

I am now the proud father of 7 children, all of them intelligent, good looking, and athletic, dealing with issues most infants, preschool, preteens, teens, and young adults experience. Having a larger sample of children to observe through these developmental phases has shown me that each child differs in the ability to locate, store, and use information. The success or failure of any search is desire. How hard should a person have to search before being satisfied or discouraged with the results? Laughable as it may seem, I feel the Internet is largely to blame for the deterioration of search skills globally.

“What?” you might be asking yourself. Consider for a moment that we now have more information available to us with a few typed phrases and mouse clicks than any other era of history combined, and still more added every millisecond.

Within this vast trove of information lays the problem. The sheer amount of accessible knowledge is making us lazy. Again “What?” Our children and those who didn’t learn how to locate information on their own have been lulled into a state of complacency, driven by the knowledge that Google is there whenever they need it. Being able to Google anything is the primary reason for the increasing ignorance of the world. It follows the path of replacing paper and pencil with a calculator.

I hear snickers. It would be a laughable statement if it wasn’t so sad. Google works against you if your education is based on the foundation of search skills currently taught in public schools. It almost sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? Google by itself is a wonderful tool. The technology enables it to parse massive amounts of text, images, videos, and all the relations between them. What could possibly make Google bad? As Adrian Monk would say “Here’s the thing…” Google employs algorithms that score intelligence and personality based upon how you search, and serve results to you accordingly.

My Internet career started as a filler gig to get out of selling tractors and treadmills at Sears. That move has led to over 10 years in Internet Marketing, specifically Natural Search Technology. My job is to understand Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the rest of the search engines. There are thousands of variables applied to any information returned to you by a search engine. Individuals and businesses are constantly trying to break down the algorithms applied to a page, or website. The pursuit of keeping “Spam” out of their searches has made Google the most secretive of the search engines.

Those who understand how Google is applying all the mentioned variables can make considerable amounts of money manipulating websites in order to rank well for a search phrase like “Cars.” In the course of my job I formulated content and linking strategies to give websites a better chance of ranking for a valuable search phrase. The only way to do this is to be ahead of the technology Google is developing to improve their search results.

Google is one of the most prolific filers of patents in the world. If Google were the government they would be Big Brother; some argue they are already. Google is a huge researcher into the role of semantics and how they relate to human behavior and intelligence. Why would they care about those things when all they are is a search engine?

Most things in this world are focused on money and power. Google is no different. G’s entire world is centered around what, when, and how you click at the top and right side columns of their sites. It’s all about the ad clicks, money they make from them, and the power they obtain through capturing user data.

By now you may be scratching your heads wondering how the little ads on Google are the downfall of intelligence around the world. The engineers at Google are incredibly smart. I consider myself fairly bright, but in their respective micro niches they are as blinding as the sun. After analyzing billions of searches every day, for 8 years, Google has come to a stunningly profitable conclusion. Users don’t respond identically to returned search results. Tuning search results to an assumed persona and intelligence level enables Google to satisfy the users, keeping them on the site longer, clicking ads, and feeling intelligent for finding information.

What’s the downside? Search results based on assumed intelligence and personality provide little incentive to delve deeper into the searched subject. By dumbing down search results Google is satisfying individual vanity at the expense of advancing education. Why should Google limit their profit margins just because users are not motivated or smart enough to make sense of the truly valid returns for their search? Although it scares me to see information manipulated to opiate the masses, it makes financial sense. In order for Google to accomplish what they do–and what they want to do, they need to create as much revenue from every user as possible. Google’s goal is to index, evaluate, and make available all the information that has ever been, or will ever be. In order to do this they need continuously flowing enormous sums of money. They obtain this money every time users click on an ad, untold millions of times a year.

Unfortunately, with nearly unlimited funds, and data, it is only a matter of time before elements of a subversive nature begin to coerce and manipulate users on an individual level. It is not beyond the scope of possibility that an individual could be targeted by IP address to receive results, search suggestions, and ads that influence them into a particular thought pattern or action. While some may see G’s ability to contextually match searches, suggestions, and ads to be an invasion of privacy, it takes one thorough reading of their terms of service to understand that by using Google you agree to whatever they decide to do with your information, or contribution. A shorter document that talks about privacy is here on the toolbar.

One interesting point to note in their Terms of Service is located in section 2:

.2 You can accept the Terms by:

(A) clicking to accept or agree to the Terms, where this option is made available to you by Google in the user interface for any Service; or

(B) by actually using the Services. In this case, you understand and agree that Google will treat your use of the Services as acceptance of the Terms from that point onwards.

2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google, or (b) you are a person barred from receiving the Services under the laws of the United States or other countries including the country in which you are resident or from which you use the Services.

2.3 Creates a serious moral, legal issue. How do you keep kids in schools from using Google? Until they reach 18 they are legally forbidden to use their services. Is that stopping them from marketing to our children? No. Google’s Terms of Service are merely a veneer of plausible denial to dispel liability should any harm come to your children by accessing information that leads to physical or mental damage, or death.

Nevertheless the only deterrent Google offers regarding underage users is in the TOS which is in small print at the bottom of the page.

The final question is, “How do they know who is searching when and where?” If I were to do a poll on all who are reading this article I would not be surprised to see 8 out of ten hands raised if I asked if you use any of the following:

• Gmail
• Google toolbar
• Youtube
• Craigslist
• and Google itself.

If you are logged in to any of these accounts your data has been diced, mashed, scrutinized and algorithmically applied to every search you do. Even if you are not logged into a service,working on a brand new computer on a wifi network anywhere in the world, Google knows within 6 searches the type of personality you trend toward and your intelligence level. They have held the patents for this technology for years, and have within the last year been employing it as a limited beta test, and implementing it for last 6 months on 90% of all searches results served by Google.

I shudder to think what would happen if Google were to suffer financial collapse by design. Google’s importance to the world is such that our government would not allow it to fail. Who knows the level of manipulation and censorship would be applied “for the greater good” to information sought if bureaucrats got involved.

Information is a double edged sword. On one hand Google can unveil the vast world of information to the truly worthy of mind, on the other are the emperors wandering around naked impressed with the knowledge they are spoon fed.

If all this wasn’t enough Google launched a new program in February of this year called Google Latitude which tracks you and your friends on a live map by using your mobile phones and devices. If George Orwell were alive he would probably shrug and say “I told you so.”

Regards,
Michael Rough

September 29, 2009

Google! Making Information and Ignorance Easy was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder